Dreaming together part 1
There have been many occasions when I have dreamed with people I am close to. In my childhood I used to dream with my brother, we would play and fly in our dreams and remember it in the morning. But as an adult, there have been many times when the love and closeness of a friendship have allowed me to enter a person’s dream, and they and I participated in the same dream scenarios. A dear friend of mine from high school has been a regular in my dreams for more than 20 years. Even now, countries apart and lives between us, we still know how we are doing and what’s going on in each other’s lives because of our dreams. I got married last year. Before informing my friend that I was doing so, she and I had a dream in which we were drinking tea and I told her I was getting married. When I called her to tell her about my wedding, she related this very dream and told me she already knew!!! Last week I dreamt that I was in a camping ground with my friend, and we were peacefully resting in the forest. My dream became blurry and I left her in the forest while I went to do other things. I woke up worried about so I texted her my dream. She told me she and I were in the forest in her dream, and after I left she had a fight with many zombies that were loosing their limbs as she fought them. This dream prompted her to ask me for a Life Coaching session, and now, in waking time, we are fighting the “leaving dead” zombies of her psyche. More about dreaming together in the next blog...
Read MoreThe first level of dream interpretation
As Robert Moss says, when it comes to finding meaning for the dream symbols, the answer always goes back to the dreamer. There are certain collective unconscious commonalities of symbols, but they all may change depending of the dreamer and its relationship with any given image. Let us take a snake as an example. Freud would say that the snake is a phallic symbol, and Jung would relate it to the archetypal snake from the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The dreamer, however, may have a totally different reading of this personal symbol when it becomes part of a dream. The dreamer may have had a pet snake growing up, and may feel very lovingly towards snakes. The symbolism would be completely different from a person who has been bitten by a snake, or who is afraid of snakes. When working with a dream, the first question has to be “what were your feelings during this dream?” The relationship with the images is the first clue as what the dream may be about. The imagery may be weird or disturbing to us, but the dreamer may have felt curious, or calmed, or surprised. So the next question may be “what do you know about snakes, what is your relationship with snakes?” The dreamer will then make connections between the dream symbols and waking life. The dream may be about “missing an old friend”, symbolized by the childhood pet snake, and the dreamer may feel lonely and wanting to connect with an old circle of friends. Or maybe the dreamer felt afraid and threatened by the snake, in which case we could ask the dreamer if she feels threatened by something in her waking life; maybe a situation at work, or a particular co-worker. And so it goes. I love working with dreams and I am quite proficient at it, I know the right questions to ask and I can get clues that would lead me to ask more specific questions. when the dreamer makes some connections about the dream that resonate with her, there is always an “aha!” moment, a small epiphany. In the next post I will write about how I work with dreams this way, putting one specific dream I had as an example....
Read MoreDream Incubation
Dreams have the potential of expanding our mind and consciousness, and they also have the potential of healing and illuminating us with knowledge we weren’t able to tap into before the dream. In Ancient Greece there were temples dedicated to different goddesses and gods, and in some of them people would come and stay for a few days, wishing to receive a dream that would answer a particular question or heal a particular illness. To wish for such a dream is called “dream incubation”, and can be done without the temples and the gods and goddesses. The concept is very simple; we ask our dreaming self to send us a dream that would help with the issue we want to illuminate, and then we wait for the dream, writing every dream carefully until we receive the answer. The dreaming mind is not rational; the dreaming mind talks to us in symbols and metaphors, so it is in this very language that we can communicate with the dreaming self. What I mean is that we can communicate to our dreaming self through metaphors and symbols that speak to us personally. I have a little wooden box, which I call my “dream incubator”, and when I ask for a particular dream I use my dream incubator as a method of communicating to my dreaming self. I write the question or the issue in a piece of paper, and I place the question in the box along with little objects or drawings that remind me of the issue. These can be little rocks or crystals, a penny, a photograph… whatever I think is vaguely related with my issue. Then I dream, and write my dreams until I receive a dream that helps me with the question. More about Dream Incubation here. Dream interpretation is a very interesting subject, since each one of us must become familiar with our own symbol dictionary in order to understand the meanings of our dreams. More about this in the next blog...
Read MoreTime within the dreamtime
There is a phenomenon I have experienced many times both in lucid and normal dreaming. The phenomenon is experienced as a mismatch between the subjective experience of time, and the “objective” passing of time, as measured by a clock. By this I mean is that my experience in the dreamtime can last days, even weeks, and yet when I wake up only a few hours have passed in the outside world. I have had dreams in which I am a different person, in a different environment and living a different life. When I wake up I can’t recognize my bedroom and don’t fully remember who I am. It takes a few minutes for my mind to re-capture the reality of this “waking” world. There is a moment of cognitive dissonance, and then the experience of the dream recedes to the background and I remember who I am and what I did the day before. On one of these occasions I realized I was an Inuit young person living on the ice. I experienced the life of this person for about three weeks; I hunted, I ate raw meat, I had a complex emotional life; I even experienced a different belief system in which I could communicate with animal spirits and had a close connection with the spirit of a polar bear. After three weeks I went to bed one night, and I dreamed that I woke up in a dark bedroom, in a strange environment I could not recognize. I was sleeping besides a person I could not remember. It took me a few minutes to remember my life as “Venus”, in my bedroom in East Vancouver. The cognitive dissonance lasted for a few confusing minutes, and then the dream reality went into the background, remaining as a strong memory. Which one of these “selves” is more real? The one I am experiencing at the time. When I am an Inuit, I don’t question my reality and sense of self any more than I do now, in this reality, writing this on my computer. Maybe there is more to consciousness than this every-day reality, and we can certainly explore it through dreaming. An interesting video: Life, Death and...
Read More